a small quantity of laudanum

This revelation helps greatly to explain Victor's manic changes of mood,
from almost delirious emotionality to an impassive lethargy. Laudanum, a
form of liquified opium, was a narcotic freely available in the latter
part of the eighteenth century. In those days its usage lacked the social
stigma that would be attached to it by later cultures and it was commonly
employed in all stations of society. Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater was published in its first version in two
installments of the London Magazine in 1821, three years after the
publication of Frankenstein, making his literary reputation
overnight. Percy Bysshe Shelley
seems to have used laudanum to dull the pain of the chronic nephritis from
which he suffered. Mary Shelley,
however, was also well aware of the more consequential abuses to which
laudanum lent itself. Her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the American
Gilbert Imlay, committed suicide by an
overdose of laudanum in November of 1816, while Mary Shelley was
still in the early stages of her novel. Thus, this detail must be seen as
colored by that tragic event. At the very least, it is a further
indication of the deep instability of Victor Frankenstein's mind at this
juncture of his career.